Distilling the difference between DavidCo's "GTD & Evernote" and "The Secret Weapon"

10-18-2013, 12:20 PM

Folks,

I'm hoping that someone will be able to help me distill the differences between David Allen Company's "GTD and Evernote for Windows" system and the "Secret Weapon" Methodology. Now that all platforms of Evernote have reminders, I want to seriously look at shifting my GTD activities from Omnifocus to Evernote, but am having trouble determining which method to use.

I'm hoping that someone will be able to help me distill the differences between David Allen Company's "GTD and Evernote for Windows" system and the "Secret Weapon" Methodology. Now that all platforms of Evernote have reminders, I want to seriously look at shifting my GTD activities from Omnifocus to Evernote, but am having trouble determining which method to use.

The DA Evernote guide is a simple, basic implementation of GTD similar to that found in the other setup guides or in the GTD book. I found the "Secret Weapon" to be overly complicated, and I would not recommend it. The Evernote setup guide is $10 so it's not a big expense. I don't use Windows, but I think I would find Wunderlist or Toodledo better for a basic set of lists than Evernote.

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I admit the interface is a tad busier than what you'd get from something like Wunderlist. On the other hand, I like how I can send PDFs, emails, etc. into Evernote and turn them into next actions. It's nice to have everything I need in one place, rather than a list that points me to items in my email accounts, or Evernote, or what have you. Others' mileage may vary.

And I admit I've been tempted to give Evernote a try for GTD, for just those reasons. I've been using Evernote for reference for a long time, and it needs a good cleaning. That's mostly because I have moved to better tools for some key reference items, particularly Zotaro for professional reference.

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Not the first time I've come across someone bringing up Zotero. I'm curious -- why do you like it better than Evernote for certain uses?

Zotero is designed for collecting citations and associated pdf's. I can go to ArXiv.org or a journal website and grab all the info on a paper and a PDF copy with one click. It's not a general purpose tool, but similar to endnote or bibdesk for managing papers. It's for people who do extensive research, e.g. faculty and grad students. Evernote is really not designed for that.

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Oh, and Scott: to be more specific about the differences between The Secret Weapon and David Allen Company's GTD for Evernote guide, the former is based on a complex system of tags and folders to set up your GTD lists. I tried to learn TSW and just gave up. The GTD and Evernote guide is more conservative when it comes to tagging, and in general the setup it suggests is far more streamlined and easier to use and maintain.

Thanks. I should have mentioned that I have the GTD for Evernote guide, but I apparently have not looked closely enough at the differences between the two tagging systems...I will study further.

I really like the idea of Evernote, and really want a single system for everything, but Evernote's current inability to automatically capture tasks that I have dictated to Siri (like Omnifocus can) is probably a deal-killer.

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Thanks. I should have mentioned that I have the GTD for Evernote guide, but I apparently have not looked closely enough at the differences between the two tagging systems...I will study further.

I really like the idea of Evernote, and really want a single system for everything, but Evernote's current inability to automatically capture tasks that I have dictated to Siri (like Omnifocus can) is probably a deal-killer.

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I've tried TSW and a few other Evernote implementations, and also looked at detail in the DAC Evernote implementation (and was one of the reviewers). Interestingly enough I actually have my own customised implementation primarily because I really wanted each project to have a separate notebook (so I could create 'project files').

My recommendation after all that is to start with the DAC implementation. It really is the simplest, most straightforward option to get your started GTD'ing in Evernote. You can always tweak after that if you find you have a different style anyway!

I wouldn't change to another tool - Evernote as my list manager and part of my reference system works so so well.

Agreed, you can also use the Evernote voice note feature instead of Siri in the future.

Right. I just wish it would fully capture the task, like "remind me to post a message on the forum tomorrow at 8am." Omnifocus captures the reminder date and time so that even if I forget/don't get a chance to process the note in Evernote into a task with reminder, I still get prodded tomorrow at 8am.

I have some fairly significant (to me) attention/focus issues, and I'm trying to figure out what I can use to keep as many things in one place as possible, with the realization that I am obligated to use Outlook Exchange for email and calendar at work, and use Gmail for my personal and consulting communications (I can use Outlook's calendar and contacts for everything, but must keep the personal and consulting emails off of the work server).